An artist's rendering of the company's wave system
(Credit: Orecon)Right now, wave power is in the early experimental stages, but venture capitalists are lining up to be on the ground floor.
Orecon has lined up $24 million in funding from Advent Ventures, Venrock, Wellington Partners and Northzone Ventures to build a full scale prototype of its wave power machine and, if the results are positive, move toward commercial deployment.
The U.K.-based Orecon has devised a large-scale buoy for harvesting power from waves. In a nutshell, waves striking the device create pressure in a chamber, which is used to turn a turbine and create electricity. A single device will be capable of producing up to 1.5 megawatts of power. Orecon's system in part is based around the engineering devised to build offshore oil rigs. The system will produce power for a minimum of 25 years, the company says.
That's similar to the buoy being built by Ireland's WaveBob. WaveBob has a 1/4 scale prototype in the waters off Galway now and hopes to insert a full-scale device, which will produce over one megawatt of power, in the water in the next few years.
Most wave systems produce far less power--maybe 250 kilowatts. Although smaller devices are cheaper to make, larger devices have certain advantages. For one thing, because they are large, they can survive rugged seas better. Each device also produces more power, which means fewer devices and potentially less maintenance.
Both the UK and Ireland want to build local wave industries and harvest energy from the sea. Both countries bear the brunt of strong waves that cross the Atlantic. WaveBob CEO Andrew Parish also pointed out in a recent interview that this section of the Atlantic is awash in maritime engineering know-how.
Still, wave energy, like tidal energy, remains mostly in the potential stage because of the environmental challenges and the costs. Over the next two to three years, expect to see larger prototypes and more testing. Commercially produced wave power may begin to start crossing the grid sometime between 2010 and 2015.
It is interesting to see Venrock in the deal. The firm mostly concentrates on more exotic technologies that could go commercial. Recently, it has put money into fusion and clean diesel.
Here's a renewable energy source most of us haven't thought of: dirt.
Living Power Systems, a company being spun out of Harvard University, has made a microbial fuel cell that is able to tease a trickle of electricity from garden-variety bacteria in the ground.
The ability to generate a tiny flow of electrons from organic material has been understood for decades and is a staple at elementary school science fairs.
Living Power Systems has developed a system that it says can create a useful amount of power, at least for specialized uses.
A sonar beacon powered by the dirt it sits on.
(Credit: Living Power Systems)Its technology consists of a material that encourages microbes in the ground to grow across the surface of an electrode and specialized circuitry that siphons off the electricity microbes create during metabolism.
"There are terawatts moving through our biosphere. Solar energy ends up in our soil and sediment," Peter Girguis, the founder and chief scientist of Living Power Systems and professor of microbiology at Harvard. "Think of it as underground solar energy."
The company, which is now looking for funding, has built prototypes of a few products for low-wattage applications.
One, called the Light Bucket, will provide enough electricity for an LED light and a cell phone charger to people in the developing world who are not connected to an electricity grid. The company is also designing a power supply for wireless sensors and outdoor lighting.
These devices only need to plug into the ground to operate, according to Girguis, who made a presentation along with other clean tech companies at the Conference on Clean Energy in Boston on Tuesday.
Although the company is targeting a few specific markets initially, Girguis said that microbial fuel cells have the potential to provide 15 percent to 20 percent of household energy by tapping into the electricity in people's yards or septic systems. The technology could be used to power a cell phone tower today, he said.
Right now, its devices can generate about one half a watt per day from a square meter of ground, or 12 watt-hours per day. In its labs, it's been able to generate 10 times that amount, according to Michael Keating, the company's co-founder and acting CEO.
That kind of power generation won't run a refrigerator or even a PC screen, but it does make sense in the developing world, Keating said.
Company executives call microbial fuel cells the "bicycle of electricity" because they are simple to operate and can be manufactured locally in developing countries.
Natural versus designer microbes
Wireless sensors, too, are compelling use for microbial fuel cells because of the high costs involved in replacing sensor batteries, company executives said.
A sketch of a planned light and cell phone charger for developing countries.
(Credit: Living Power Systems)For the past two years, a device using the company's technology has been drawing electricity from the sediment at the bottom of Monterey Bay in California. The sonar navigational beacon for nuclear submarines was deployed as part of a military grant. A device in a lab has been operating for six years.
"The best implementation of this is to use it in a setting where you want to deploy a device and leave it alone," Girguis said.
A number of organizations are researching microbial fuel cells, including universities that are designing microbes specifically to generate electricity. Synthetic Genomics, headed by genetics pioneer J. Craig Venter, and other firms are looking to make power from human waste by manipulating microorganisms.
By contrast, Living Power Systems is focused on trying to harness energy from naturally occurring bacteria rather than those specially designed for power generation, said Girguis.
Next year, the company intends to have products for a combined light and cell phone charger aimed at the developing world. It expects to have its garden light and wireless sensor power supply next year as well, according to Keating.
BOSTON--When it comes to bragging rights and solar power, Google's on top: it has the largest corporate installation of solar-powered electricity yet.
But that apparently is just the beginning. The search giant is also considering other forms of renewable energy, according to Robyn Beavers, the director of environmental programs at Google. Google intends to generate 50 megawatts of electricity from renewable forms for its operations by 2012.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin charge a plug-in beneath its solar-powered car port.
(Credit: Google)Beavers spoke at the Conference on Clean Energy here on Monday where she outlined a number of initiatives that Google participates in aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Those include the 1.6 megawatt solar installation at its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. In addition to panels on building roofs, Google has constructed a car port with solar panels as a roof, under which people can charge up plug-in hybrids.
Asked whether Google was considering wind power, Beavers said she couldn't say. But she didn't leave much doubt that all forms of renewable energy are actively under consideration.
"Wind, solar, geothermal, fuel cells--you name it, we're looking into it," she said.
Corporate buyers are prized customers for the thousands of clean-tech start-ups that have cropped up over the past few years. Wal-Mart's decision to invest in solar has been a closely watched move and indicator of solar power demand.
Renewable energy projects like solar, wind or biomass can be financially interesting to businesses because they typically allow companies to get a contract with fixed energy prices, which acts as a hedge against rising rates.
In the case of Google, which consumes a lot of electricity to power its operations and data centers, its investment in solar electricity will pay for itself in seven and a half years. Its consumption from the grid has been reduced by 30 percent and its bills cut down a lot more than 30 percent, Beavers said.
SEATTLE--Carbon offsets, energy efficiency credits, renewable energy certificates. The lexicon of the new, niche business world of brokering in greenhouse gases was spoken at the Discover Brilliant conference Monday. (It felt like being in Charlie Brown's classroom.)
Carbon markets have begun to boom over the past year, offering corporations options for offsetting their emissions by trading them with cleaner companies. Many proponents of carbon trading want laws to force businesses to clean up their act.
"As long as companies can dump carbon without paying, they will," said K.C. Golden, policy director of Climate Solutions, a nonprofit that advises businesses on renewable energy strategies.
Under Europe's mandatory carbon cap and trade system that took effect this year, companies are allowed to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. To make up for exceeding that level, businesses buy expensive credits from companies that release fewer carbons. Europe borrowed the idea from the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1990, which set up caps and trading for sulfur dioxide, which causes smog.
Carbon markets are set to take off here in 2009 once a cap-and-trade program comes into effect in 11 Northeastern states. California establishes its own system in 2011, and is setting up emissions trading with Oregon, Washington state and British Columbia.
Attempts to offset carbons spewed into the atmosphere are attractive for companies seeking to wash their hands of causing climate change. The trading might be lucrative where mandatory, especially for businesses that already emit few carbons.
"If you're a large emitter, emitting tens of millions of tons of carbon and each one of those tons is a $10 cost, there's a noticeable impact on your balance sheet--or it can be a noticeable plus if you can sell it," said Gordon Smith, EcoLands Director of the nonprofit Environmental Resources Trust.
PepsiCo bought in April the largest chunk of renewable energy certificates yet--500,000 terawatt hours worth--through the for-profit Sterling Planet, which also supplies green pricing programs to 43 utilities companies.
Critics, however, contend that carbon trading is a distracting shell game that lets companies dump some carbon in one place while supposedly removing it elsewhere--kind of like throwing trash out your car window on the way to volunteer at a beach clean-up.
Determining the effectiveness of these new markets is sure to get harder as they grow. The very concept of carbon trading is an abstraction upon an abstraction, sort of the way a hedge fund is. It's hard to visualize carbon in the air, unlike other environmental hazards, such as banned aerosol from hairsprays that would hiss in your face, or cigarette smoke.
Even the seemingly more concrete efforts to reduce carbons are hard to measure. Environmental Resources Trust, which creates a registry of emissions rather than a market for trading them, specializes in forestry credits. The goal is to get more trees in the ground to suck up carbon dioxide. Trees look lovely and may be easier to count than abstract emissions certificates, but measuring their effectiveness is not.
I'm a big fan of solar power. But as with anything, I like to know exactly what I'm getting. One of the big unspoken issues in the solar sector is the difference between the rated or estimated potential output of a solar system--and the actual production of kilowatt-hours. A range of factors from the margin of error in the modules, to temperature, dust and losses from wiring, conversion to AC power and any batteries all can contribute to as much as 30 percent lower actual power production--even in the first year.
Compounding this problem in my mind is that in California only about a third to half of our solar installations are actually independently monitored, according to one of my friends at Fat Spaniel, one of the leading monitors of solar systems.
The California Energy Commission did some good thumbnail analysis of solar in the real world several years ago.
Here's the punch line from their analysis:
"So the '100-watt module' output, reduced by production tolerance, heat, dust, wiring, AC conversion and other losses will translate into about 68 watts of AC power delivered to the house panel during the middle of a clear day (100 watts x 0.95 x 0.89 x 0.93 x 0.95 x 0.90 = 68 watts)." From A Guide to Photovoltaic System Design and Installation (PDF) by the California Energy Commission. If you are interested in solar, you need to read their report.
But this 68 watts is only part of the story. If you have battery storage on the system they say it could reduce the power another 6-10 percent. They then stated that poor installation layout problems--including shading can take an additional toll. Another big issue is the angle of the roof and the direction it faces (in California, where your roof faces can affect the power output up to another 15 percent for many roofs). And interesting enough, for all the talk about making windows out of solar in what is typically described as Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV), a vertical installation can reduce the power output up to about half all by itself!
Their bottom line: if the system is perfectly installed under perfect conditions the best case scenario for San Francisco would be 1,724 kwh, or electricity per year for each kilowatt installed and for Los Angeles would be about 1,758. But that's before all the "real-world" adjustments. When you make all those real-world adjustments--take another 25-30 percent or more off the top, even for a well designed system. This fits with our best San Francisco benchmark, our major 675 kW rooftop solar facility in the San Francisco at Moscone Center, which produces around 1,200 kilowatt-hours per year per rated kilowatt installed.
So when it comes to solar, let's make the right choice for solar power, but make it with our eyes open to the real world.
Ze-Gen has pulled in a pile of money to make power from piles of trash.
The Boston-based company on Monday announced that it has secured $4.5 million in funding to carry through on its plans to build a facility that converts municipal solid waste into electricity.
As previously reported, Flagship Ventures led the financing which was joined by VantagePoint Venture Partners. The $4.5 million complements an initial $2.25 million in seed funding.
Next week, Ze-Gen will open a test facility in New Bedford, Mass, which will take construction site debris and pass it through a bath of molten metal.
That gasification process, which can work with a range of waste products, chemically changes the trash into a liquid synthetic gas, or syngas, which is burned to make drive a turbine and make electricity. The plant is expected to operating commercially next year.
Waste-to-power technologies don't benefit from government clean energy subsidies, but Ze-Gen says that its facilities will be cleaner than fossil fuel power plants and use a renewable resource: municipal trash.
Wind power #1 renewable energy investment
(Credit: United Nations)Money is pouring into renewable energy. And it's a global trend. The United Nations on Wednesday reported that $100 billion went into renewable energy and efficiency technologies last year. That's a record--up $20 billion from 2005. Indications are 2007 will set another record. You can read a summary of the United Nations report here.
Once dominated by North America and Europe, renewable energy investments are spreading out. Last year, 9 percent went into China. Investors from India were active in acquisitions.
Money's coming from stock markets, venture capital investments and private individuals. Publicly traded renewable energy stocks rose more than 60 percent during the recent 15 months including the first quarter of 2007. That fuels even more investor interest.
Among the types of renewable energy, wind is most popular with investors. It's followed by solar and biofuels. High petroleum prices are given some of the credit for the strength of renewable energy investment, along with concern over climate change.
- prev
- 1
- next
